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From Self-Love to Other Love and Back Again

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Mini–Love-Lesson # 185

FREE over 200 mini-love-lessons touching the lives of thousands in over 190 countries – worldwide

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson teaches you about how healthy
self-love supports and improves love of another, how that influences how
much love comes your way and how it improves love’s quality. This mini-love-lesson also covers
self-love’s influence on the magic ‘five to one ratio’ that keeps
relationships alive and growing, and it reveals the importance of love
cycling.

What About This First Love Yourself Stuff?

“To love another you must first love yourself” is a frequently stated
concept – you may have run into it before. You even may have wondered
about it. Is it true? Can self-love really help you in your love of
someone else? Are problems in love relationships rooted in a lack of
self-love? (See mini-love-lesson Self-Love – What Is It?) What does love yourself
really mean? How exactly does self-love effect loving another?
Doesn’t this idea contradict the ethical and religious teachings that
say self-love is a bad thing and a serious sin? If someone I love
doesn’t love themselves is that hurting our relationship? How exactly
does one go about loving themselves? Yes, there are a great many
questions to ponder concerning this often repeated concept. Let’s see
if we can answer some of them and let’s start with this one.

What Happens in a Relationship Lacking Sufficient Self-Love?

Without sufficient self-love, an adult love relationship is not adult
enough! At least frequently that is the case. Especially in romantic
and life-mate style love, childlike neediness tends to occur and get in
the way. Dependency forms of false love, including the much written
about one called codependency, develop. Healthy, adult style real love
is blocked from developing. Immature, dysfunctional ways increasingly
tend to sabotage the interactions in the love relationship. Usually
this destroys the growth of healthy, real love and the relationship
comes to a painful end. At best, the relationship never attains its
potential for fulfillment, happiness or healthy adult functioning.

One way to think about it goes like this: the love relationship is
dominated by the love-needy, inner child self in one or both partners.
That subconscious, inner child self wants parent type love instead of
adult-to-adult love too often and too much. That makes it easy for one
or both partners to have lots of child level, fear-based dynamics. Then
frustration, misunderstandings and miscommunications increase.
Frequently sibling-like fights break out and immature, unhappy, childish
emotions prevail.

Worst of all, a great lack of developing, adult ways
of going about life together occurs and keeps getting worse. The
how-to’s of adult, healthy, real love never are learned because needy,
child-level love is the best the couple usually can manage. They may at
times play well together in passionate sex and other fun ways
which helps them keep going but that too usually fades as resentments
and disappointments go unresolved. Adult love skills never sufficiently
are learned and adult, problem solving, love-based teamwork goes
unpracticed.

Erich Fromm, the great psychotherapist and social philosopher, once
said, “To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love”.
Without sufficient self-love we keep getting easily wounded and then we
act to wound back the one we love most and we don’t know how to stop.
We keep wanting our loved partner to play the all-forgiving, loving
parent and fix us. If they don’t, it just gets worse because we do not
know how to do self-love based, self fixing, let alone couple fixing.

Self Fixing and Team Fixing Via Self-Love

With sufficient self-love you do not easily get hurt but
when you do it is a lot easier to either fix yourself or ask your loved
partner to lovingly assist you in your adult self fixing and to work
with you in relationship fixing. Without that self-love, you are likely
to ignore your own needs or get defensive, manipulative, demanding or
overly wimpy. Then you may put too much needy, fix me pressure
on your beloved. Healthy, real self-love helps you stay adult and keep
working out adult “I win, you win” improvements and solutions.
Insecurities, frustration and anger may corrupt cooperative, love
interactions. If you can stay on track with the help of your real
self-love, and not go into escape or attack modes of reacting,
improvements can occur.

When hearing what sounds like criticism or putdowns, with self-love
it is easier to think something like “It’s getting kind of hard to catch
what this person is throwing at me, so it must be time to remind myself
that I am abundantly okay and wonderful enough, so I don’t need to let
myself get all hurt and upset. In fact, I’m also strong enough to hear,
with love, what this person has to say, knowing it may tell me
something useful and perhaps tell me more about them than me”. Without
sufficient self-love you might find yourself thinking something like
“I’m under attack and have to attack back or escape, and what a terrible
person my beloved is for attacking me” or “Of course my beloved is
right and what a miserable and inadequate person I am”. Self-love can
help you stay okay enough to keep working on mutual solutions even when
things are hard and not going well.

The Lack of Self-Love and the Growth of False Love

Those who lack sufficient self-love are thought to be much more
vulnerable to false forms of love infecting their lives. It works sort
of like the starving person who is much more likely to eat anything they
can get and, thus, is in danger of becoming malnourished and food
poisoned. The self loving person can be much more discerning about what
they take in. They also are much more likely to insist on getting
higher-quality, real love. If they are love knowledgeable and can tell
the difference, they will not long put up with false, stingy or poor
quality love efforts, which is what low self-love causes people to do.

It seems dependency forms of false love are particularly common among
those who are low in healthy, real self-love. Living with large
amounts of neglect and both psychological and physical abuse, along with
unfulfilling false love, is seen to be much more common among those
with low self-love. Susceptibility to destructive addictions
unfortunately frequently can become part of this picture.

The dynamics described above show how important it is to learn the
differences between healthy, real love and the major forms of false
love. That is part of why Kathleen McClaren and I wrote Real Love False Love, Which Is Yours?
which is the only book we know of covering multiple forms of false love
and the only book that tells you how to understand each and what you
can do to avoid, escape or transform false love into real love. By the
way, Real Love, False Love is now available internationally at Amazon.com, in the Kindle edition at a new low price; reviews are desired.

What Happens in Relationships That Have Enough Self-Love?

The couples who have enough healthy self-love in both people are thought to be much more able to accomplish the almost magical five to one rule.
The five to one rule refers to the discovery that when couples send
back and forth 5 love-positive statements or actions for every 1
anti-love or non-love statement or action they are far more likely to
succeed as a lasting, okay couple. This 5 to 1, positive,
communication, ratio dynamic especially is found to be helpful when
couples are interacting where conflict is involved. Those with low
self-love are thought to be much more likely to fall below this ratio
which means mutual misery and possibly break-up is much more likely.
(Consult the “Love Positive Talking” mini-love-lesson).

High self-love also means a greater likelihood of avoiding, or more quickly fixing, all the problems mentioned above.

With healthy self-love you have far more love to give because your cup runneth over, a lot and often. Not only that, but because you seldom are in an empty or needy state,
you want to give your love more and better. It is like the difference
between being hungry and malnourished with only scraps to eat or having a
full larder and wanting to create and serve up wonderful meals for all
those you care about. Not only are you able to feed the hungry but you
can serve up love meals that are much healthier and especially tasty.

One of the greatest advantages to high self-love is the lack of fear
in people who have it. With high self-love they tend not to fear being
worthy enough, being important to their beloved, being afraid of
rejection or abandonment or being unlovable. Those with low self-love
tend to fear those things a great deal of time. High self-love people
also do not have to fear asking for the love they want and the way they
want it showed. That means they are free of having to play
psychological games and other trickery trying to get the love they
hunger for. In turn, that means they do not have to go for long periods
tolerating not having love showed to them (being fed) and they are not
likely to undervalued or poorly receive the love coming their way.

Remember, with high enough healthy self-love, part of your self-care
is to insist on getting frequent, high quality love and not just
scraps. First insist on that of yourself as well as insisting to
yourself that you give likewise. Then you can lovingly effectively go
after what you want with and from your beloved.

People with healthy self-love tend to have more love to give and tend
to do it better. That helps make them more okay and, thus, more
desirable to healthy, self loving others. Two strong, okay, loving
people make a strong loving couple much better than if one or both are
weak or stuck in victimness and in need of repeated rescuing.

The Return Trip of Love

In healthy, happy, well functioning, love relationships there is a
cycle of love going out to a beloved and then love coming back from the
beloved. Self-love is very important for creating this cycle and
keeping it going. Sometimes there are things that get in the way like a
crisis, having to be absent from one another for a lengthy time,
external ongoing heavy demands on time and energy for one or both,
etc.. At these times healthy self-love is a big assistance for getting
through them. Healthy self-love can motivate healthy self-care to
compensate for gaps in the ongoing cycling of love. Healthy self-love
also can provide strength and motivation for getting those gaps closed
so the love cycling is flowing again.

It is not good to barter giving love so as to get it because real
love is a free gift. But when two people connect in love with each
other, a two-way cyclical dynamic can be created. The same happens in
families and friendship groups except the numbers of participants often
are larger. Part of the support for the dynamic of healthy love cycling
is healthy self-love. Healthy self-love supports and often motivates
healthy love of others and then it motivates an other to send back love,
creating an ongoing cycle of love.

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question:
How good are you at self-love and self-care, while at the same time
lovingly interacting with someone you love, especially when there is a
difficulty occurring? (We suggest you take some time with this question
and maybe talk it over with a loved one to find out how they see it).

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